Associate Professor, Department of Public Policy and AdministrationRutgers University-Camden

Scholars of political incorporation understand that for African Americans, the foundation of advancement in electoral politics has been the concentration of black voters in jurisdictions where they could engage in mobilization campaigns and out-vote whites simply by virtue of their sheer numbers. At the same time, scholars of urban poverty have argued that concentration or neighborhood effects negatively impact the life chances of residents of deprived neighborhoods over and above the effects of their individual characteristics. The question is how concentration effects can be good for politics but bad for the very people who need political representation the most, the urban poor. I explore the problem using micro-data to examine shifting patterns of political participation and poverty for the City of Philadelphia since 1970.

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